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CDN stands for "Content Delivery Network." When you try to reach a website, a CDN routes you to the server that sits geographically closest to you, so you receive the site's data from that nearby location. In practice, it stores the images, videos and other assets of a website statically, optimizes them, and delivers them to visitors as quickly as possible.
Content delivery networks hold a large share of everything on the internet, including text, images, code, downloadable media, software, documents, live-stream video, social networks, e-commerce platforms and applications. In short, they help a website manage its visitor traffic and, above all, improve server response times.
A CDN keeps a cached copy of a website's content in a separate version. It distributes that cached information to servers in different locations and stores it there; when the content is needed, the cached data is served from the requested server.
When a user anywhere in the world wants to reach a site, the data is served not from the site's origin server but from the server closest to that user. This minimizes the distance between the visitor and the site, so the page and its assets load far faster. But how does this actually happen?
The CDN uses the user's DNS address to identify the nearest server. Based on that DNS address, it picks the closest server and uses the cached data stored there to deliver the page to the visitor quickly.
If you run a website, you want to serve visitors as well as you possibly can. That takes more than visuals and design; the technical side matters too. Naturally, you want your site to run faster, and a CDN helps with exactly that. But is a CDN only a traffic officer that keeps the flow of the site in order? What else does it do?
As mentioned, the most obvious benefit of a CDN is that it speeds up site traffic and lets visitors reach the site in less time. Because data is served from the nearest location, load times for the site, its files and its images all improve. Download speeds rise and latency drops noticeably as well.
On top of that, websites normally have a server limit. If the volume of content and traffic on your site pushes you past that limit, your costs go up. A CDN keeps that expense to a minimum.
A DDoS is a cyberattack that takes over or disables a host's services, either briefly or indefinitely. Such attacks can knock your site offline temporarily or completely and can even let the attacker seize control of it. Guarding against this calls for several precautions, and one of them is a CDN.
A CDN acts as a kind of firewall that shields your site from external attacks. It defends against malicious actors such as bots, and those attacks are absorbed within the CDN without harming your site's traffic or availability.
A CDN improves your SEO performance and helps you rank higher in search engines. It also lets you increase the uptime and availability of your site and applications, and it makes your site scalable so you can keep optimizing it.
On certain peak days, shopping sites in particular see traffic climb many times over. A CDN balances that load and spreads the traffic across different servers, easing the pressure on any single one. This traffic-distribution process is called load balancing, and it removes the risk of crashes, slowdowns and server overload.
CDN pricing varies with the size of your site, its traffic, the size of the files it hosts and several other factors. That said, there are plenty of free CDNs you can use. Here are a few we'd recommend, so you can move your website forward while keeping costs to a minimum.
Cloudflare markets itself as more than "just a CDN," and it lives up to the slogan. Founded in the United States in 2009, it has been one of the most popular free CDN services ever since, with more than 200 servers in over 100 countries.
Cloudflare can integrate SSL, CDN, basic security protection and WordPress caching plugins, and those capabilities have made it a favorite. It even runs a server in Istanbul.
Another of the most popular free CDN providers is Incapsula. Developed by Imperva, this service is a great fit for bloggers, largely because it offers a CAPTCHA security feature to guard against spam comments and bot spam. It also provides caching, compression and image optimization free of charge.
Photon isn't quite a full CDN; it's a Jetpack module. Even so, it helps the images on your site load faster and eases the strain on your bandwidth. If you use WordPress and rely on a lot of imagery, Photon is worth having. To use it, you need to install the Jetpack module, then activate it.
Web hosting stores an entire site on its own, whereas a CDN only caches that site's data and keeps it on distributed servers. A CDN uses various optimization techniques to preserve bandwidth, which in turn boosts the performance of the hosted server.
A CDN increases speed and prevents problems such as connection hiccups, weak security and slow content delivery — things web hosting can't do on its own. Content delivery networks can also work with your own server. Hosting gives you a platform on which to run your main website, and a CDN supplies proxy servers to distribute it more efficiently. This doesn't just benefit visitors; it also lowers your business's costs.
